Todd Phillips is an agent of chaos.
The Hangover and Joker director famously dropped out of NYU film school and stole camera equipment.
His filmmaking has been defined by characters who live outside a set of normal social standards, epitomized by his first feature films:
Road Trip (2000)
The ultimate anti-college experience
Old School (2003)
40-something guys miss college, so they exploit a loophole to turn a family home into a frat house
Starsky and Hutch (2004)
In one wild scene, Ben Stiller (Agent Starsky) fires a gun into a garage, striking a pony
But Phillips’ mid-career pièce de résistance was The Hangover (2009). The lynchpin for the film’s success is the mentally unstable friend Alan (played brilliantly by joker Zach Galifianakis). He roofies a bachelor party and introduces chaos at every turn. Alan doesn’t subscribe to any customary moral, ethical, or legal laws—he is bound only by devotion to his friends.
While The Hangover finds comedy in this premise, Joker (2019) exposes the dark side of a mentally unstable man seeking to belong.
At the Joker premiere, Todd Phillips discussed the star Joaquin Phoenix’s performance:
“I jokingly say [Pheonix] is an agent of chaos. He has chaos in him, and you know you can act that, probably, but if you don’t have to, there's something to that… I jokingly say [Joaquin] is the tunnel at the end of the light.”
Introducing more mayhem into the fray, Joker: Folie à Deux (2024) is set to be a dystopian Jukebox Musical with at least 15 songs.
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